healed (dramione)

33 : Hermione

Song for the Chapter: Foreverland ~ The Divine Comedy

Hermione's POV

I woke up in what I could only imagine to be the dungeons.

Blinking sleep out of my eyes, I sat up and huddled against a blanket I didn't recognise. So imagine my surprise when I set my feet on the floor and felt facial features beneath them.

"What the hell?" I cried. I gasped when I saw Draco lying on the floor at my feet, snoring loudly. This was not another dream. Right?

"Rise and shine," mumbled Draco with a yawn. I was so inexplicably confused and angry that I collided my foot with his forehead and stood up dizzily.

"Ow!" He yelled, rubbing his nose and sitting up. "No need for that! Relax. I can explain."

"I should bloody hope so!" I exclaimed. I was acting a lot angrier than I actually was. In fact, I found Draco's struggle pretty funny. And cute.

"I found you in the library. You were asleep. I carried you back here. Welcome to my lodgings, Slytherin HQ." Draco spread out his arms in mock-pride.

"I'm in the Slytherin common room?" I hissed, the colour draining from my face. "This place is horrible, Draco. It's full of people who hate me. It feels...oh, it feels awful."

I suddenly shuddered. To be sitting so comfortably in such a horrible, terrible place that Voldemort had sat in felt tainted. Contaminated. Wrong.

Draco sat down beside me and did the thing that I loved - he lapsed into one of his more serious moments and studied me carefully, like I was the most important thing in the world.

"Hey, I know it's horrible," he mumbled uncomfortably. "But someone as badass as you knows that you could kill the horrible people that have sat here in a heartbeat. And you would. You're not the one who's had to live here all their life."

I fell silent. He was right. "I'm sorry," I muttered. "I'm going to get out of here. Thanks for rescuing me, or whatever you did." Draco grimaced and I made my way towards the door.

"Hermione?"

I turned around.

"You look all right, you know. Even with your awful hair."

I smiled despite myself, and started to laugh. "You're not bad yourself, for a lousy git with bleached hair."

I left the Slytherin common room with a new air of happiness. That is, until I came face to face with Harry and Ron, red-faced and heaving trunks down the hall.

"Mione! Good Christmas?" Asked Harry cheerfully.

"Fair," I said with a smile pointed firmly at him alone. "How about you?"

"Good," beamed Harry. "Really good. Ginny and I...well, it's going well." Both he and Harry burst out laughing.

I smirked. "Okay," I muttered. "Well, it - it's good to see you." Finally, I turned to Ron. "Both of you."

Ron grimaced. It was clear he didn't really want to talk to me. "Well, we'd better go and put our stuff away, Harry."

Harry nodded and they both walked off. As I sat down for breakfast, it felt strange that I wasn't really fazed by Ron's lack of speech.

He didn't want to be friends. I didn't want to be friends. I was, in a way, completely and utterly over Ron.

I smiled to myself as Draco swaggered into breakfast as he always did, a twinkle in his eyes and a smirk on his face directed, not for the first time, wholly at me.

And, not for the first time, I smiled back.

I was happy.

Author's Note: Hi! Sorry this was so delayed, school work was way more hectic than I thought lol. Big shout-out to everybody who's added this book to their reading lists, voted and commented - all 1.8k of you mean the world. Vote and comment everyone! :)